Top journalists' email passwords made public, as scandal imp

Top journalists' email passwords made public, as scandal imp

27th Oct 17:10

In what is arguably the largest-scale security breach so far in Sweden, a leak of 93,678 password-email combinations became public. The accounts belong to all the top reporters, politicians, and bloggers in Sweden.

Yesterday, messages began to appear on William Petzall's (a Right Wing Swedish MP) Twitter account making the explosive accusation that SD leader Jimmie Akesson and party secretary Bjorn Soder had hacked into the email accounts of Swedish journalists and their political opponents.

The messages on Petzall's Twitter account continued to produce "evidence", publishing the email addresses and passwords (in the form of MD5 hashes) of leading journalists.

William Petzall's lawyer said that his client was not making the Twitter postings, and that he did not have access to the internet where he is hospitalised. In other words, the story from the Petzall camp is that an unauthorised person has taken over the troubled politician's Twitter account and making the controversial tweets.

To make things worse, more than 90,000 passwords and usernames associated with the popular Swedish blog portal, Bloggtoppen.se, have been released - making it easy for anyone to break into accounts belonging to newspaper journalists, politicians and journalists.

Things wouldn't be so critical, of course, if people weren't using the same passwords on multiple websites.

A stark message currently greets visitors to Bloggtoppen:

Today, the Aftonbladet newspaper has reported that a further 57 other websites have also been hacked, and the login details of up to 200,000 people are at risk.

This story, along with many others this year reinforce the importance of using different passwords for different websites.